One thing that I find funny about human beings is that they seem to wonder about the meaning of love more often than they do about the meaning of life. Moreover, most people spend their entire lives for love and not for life itself. It’s as if life is just an empty container with the sole purpose of being filled up, to the very brim, by love. But, before I dive into this, let me just ask what makes love figure in the existential question of the meaning of life? What is in love that makes it so special? What is in love that makes something or someone so special? In a given situation, let’s say, in a mall jammed with people, everyone would disappear the moment you lay your eyes on that person whom you find attractive. In that specific moment, the entire world would not matter to you. It is just you and that other person that are existing in the universe, and in between you two is attraction. In love, there is attraction, but one that is much stronger than the example I just gave. It’s the kind of attraction that cannot ever be stopped as long as it is there. It is so powerful that it takes over one’s ability to think rationally. It makes someone forget about other human beings, the environment and the rest of the world. Especially, when two people are deeply in love with each other, they tend to care about nothing but themselves – it’s just the two of them that exist. However, there’s more to love than just attraction. There is inspiration. This is probably the happiest part about love. When someone is in love, that person is inspired to live. The entire world seems so colorful, bright and filled with so much meaning. It is as if blinking your eyes or moving the dust in the air with your arms makes you feel excitement and serenity at the same time. It is like you’re at peace but you’re never bored. You start to believe that you understand what it means to exist. You simply feel happiness just by merely existing in this planet, and you attribute all of that to the one person who makes you feel oh-so-irrevocably-in-love. On the other hand, there is the nemesis of inspiration which I would like to call devastation. It is in this one, of the many faces of love, where hearts and worlds are broken. You see, just by that being said, you could already get a grasp of why love figures in the existential question of the meaning of life. In just a snap, from being thankful for living in a world full of color and meaning it abruptly changes to wondering why life needs to be lived through so much pain and agony. Your entire universe starts to collapse into a black hole that sucks the life out of you from within yourself the moment that the one you love shatters your heart into microscopic pieces. You begin to hate life and you ask yourself why you exist. Sometimes, people give up and embrace death a lot earlier than they’re supposed to. But, most of the time, human beings find a way to squeeze their way out of that black hole and back to the world, in a quest for a new beginning. Usually, they find religion. Religion is one of the most influential things that ever existed in the world. It is not an organization that you become a part of so you can include it in your resume. In more famous religions, you worship a God and follow His ways every second of your day. To do good deeds, say good things and think of good thoughts will be your way of life. But, what does this have to do with love? In Christianity, they say that God is love. I agree with this, however, not the way that most of us do. The phrase, “God is love”, is understood as love being a part of a much bigger whole which is God. I see it differently. Love is God. I have nothing against Christianity. It just so happened that I see God as another term for love. No one has proved the existence of God ever since the first person who ever tried in history. As David Hume put it, “Based solely on our observations of human experience, we find insufficient evidence to assume the existence a good, all-wise, all-powerful god.” On the contrary, love is everywhere. Often at times, we confuse ourselves with our different definitions of love. In Carl Javier’s, “The Grammar of Love”, he mentioned that the problem with us people is we treat love as a noun and not as a verb. He explained that love is a continuous process without a telos or an end goal. In other words, love can be compared to the actions of leadership that a leader does and not to the position given to the leader. However, the real problem is not with how most of us define love. It’s that we define love. There is no exact measurement for love. “As complexity rises, precise statements lose meaning and meaningful statements lose precision” [Lofti Zadeh, 1965]. We all try to confide love in our own little boxes of definitions and we act like we can just organize it the way we do our lunch boxes back in elementary. We fail to understand that love is too big and powerful for us to capture and seal in a little plastic container. We could all be mistaken about love for all we know. There is so much more about love that we are to find out. Throughout the centuries, the only thing about love that we were sure of was its existence and importance in our lives. We all know for a fact that without love, we cannot survive. When I say love, I do not mean romantic love. I speak on behalf of all the other variations of love. I love music. I feel like I cannot live without it. It seems to me that if music did not exist in this universe, I would probably be walking aimlessly through life. But, it is not because music, in itself, is the meaning of my life. It is because I love it. I play basketball, I fence, I dance and I do a lot of other things that make me happy. Yet, music stands out. It’s just the same as any other hobby out there. The only difference is that I love it. There is attraction, inspiration, devastation and religion between existences that live with love. Through that, we gratify love for giving us an impeccable meaning for our existence. There is nothing in this world that could outdo what love does, at least none that we know of yet. Who knows, maybe love is what started the big bang after all? Maybe we didn’t really have to look far, out there. Maybe, just maybe, the answer was right here with us, inside. But, who am I to speak of certainty with regards to this topic? I can only know much about love and never everything about it. I can only be certain that it exists here and now and that I am grateful for it every day. True enough, it seems funny at first for human beings to spend their short lives dwelling on this matter. But, on second thought, there may actually be nothing funny about it. It makes perfect sense. Love makes us feel. Love makes us feel human. Why wouldn’t you live life for something that makes you feel alive?
Posted on: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 04:00:16 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015